I am responsible. Although I may not be able to prevent the worst from happening I am responsible for my attitude toward the inevitable misfortunes that darken life.

If you have a positive attitude and constantly strive to give your best effort eventually you will overcome your immediate problems and find you are ready for greater challenges.

A positive attitude causes a chain reaction of positive thoughts events and outcomes. It is a catalyst and it sparks extraordinary results.

In my world history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting a play a song or a poem that speaks of the event.

I was very much into buying contemporary art but I've just decided I want to get rid of it all. Not that it's not great art but all of a sudden my mood has changed and I want to go back to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century masters.

I think no artist can claim to have any access to the truth or an authentic version of an event. But obviously they have slightly better means at their disposal because they have their art to energize whatever it is they're trying to write about. They have music.

Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.

When money and hype recede from the art world one thing I won't miss will be what curator Francesco Bonami calls the 'Eventocracy.' All this flashy 'art-fair art' and those highly produced space-eating spectacles and installations wow you for a minute until you move on to the next adrenaline event.

After its hothouse incubation in the seventies appropriation breathed important new life into art. This life flowered spectacularly over the decades - even if it's now close to aesthetic kudzu.

Anyone who relishes art should love the extraordinary diversity and psychic magic of our art galleries. There's likely more combined square footage for the showing of art on one New York block - West 24th Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues - than in all of Amsterdam's or Hamburg's galleries.